When you have just started or about to start a new job in networking or tech in general, you have a very small windows during which you are hopefully not already overloaded with tasks and activities.

During this honeymoon lasting from 1 to 4 weeks, you should look at learning as much as possible with aim to create a environment to thrive in and evolve rapidly, as well as make your day to day job easier and a lot more pleasant.

In this post, I will share with you 5 things I consistently do.

Network documentation

If you have been hired to look after an existing network, ask for design documents. There should ideally be a HLD and LLD documents.
These documents will explain the topology, protocols used and most importantly why these choices were made. This information alone, will give you a great head start.

Run through these documents, use them to audit the network and make notes of questions or area where you see room for improvements. Most importantly, pay great attention to road maps, as they will give a very directions and an insight on what is to come. 

If these documents are hard copies, expect to find discrepancies, as updating physical documents does not always happen. Digital documentation tends to be more accurate and better maintained. 

If you role is of an operations nature, like a NOC engineer for example or if you do find the design documents too complex, then you can fall back on looking up task tracking and trouble tickets system. Here, you will find resolved cases, old projects and activities and get a good feel of what has been going on.

Tools

As network engineers, we learn at very early stage that knowing CLI and how protocols works is not enough. It is critical to know which other tools are available and how to use them to extract the information you need.

To run a network and keep it healthy, we rely on monitoring tools which notifies us about outages, capacity and link utilisation trends, security breaches and overall services quality. We have all used at some point network management systems, syslog servers, such as HP Openview, Splunk, CACTI to list a few.

These tools are not reserved for operations teams only, but for designers and architects, so trends can be evaluated and forecast. So, during this grace period, find out which tools are available to you, get login credentials and start getting familiar their interfaces and available reports.

KPIs

It took me a while to realise that each role I had and each team I joined was measured differently. This is ideally something you should ask for during your interview process. Not only will it make what is expected of you clearer, but also shows future employers and bosses that you are looking to deliver what they need. 

It is basically asking “What can I do to deliver what you need”. Is it about designing cost efficient network, reducing the MTTR, improve documentation, improve customer experience, close projects within deadlines, or perhaps design in a cost efficient manner and save on budget.

When you know what you or your team is measured on, you can focus your efforts towards meeting those target KPIs.

Network

When I say network, I don’t just mean going around shaking hands and introducing yourself. Sure, this is definitely something you should do, At the end of the day, loads of interesting debates and conversations do not take place in meeting rooms, but around the hallway coffee machine.

What I really mean by networking, is to formally commit and spend time with different relevant teams. If you are an architect, spend time with designers and operations teams.

If you are an implementation engineer, spend time with architects, watch which issues are common and reoccurring, there might be a way you could improve the design to fix these.

Equally, if you are in architect role, spend time with the implementation and design engineers. learn about their challenges and take their valuable input into consideration.

Don’t make waves

In other words, dont be the smartest guy in the room.

You have just started and have not been in the company long enough, so smart thing would be to keep away from heated debates and use the time observe, listen and learn, basically get to know the culture.

As a new colleague, you will undoubtedly see things with a fresh pair of eyes, possibly things which needs to be improved. This does not mean your colleagues are not aware of these issues, it could be that they are simply overloaded and working on higher priorities.

It is always nice to show respect to the old guard, and hold back til you have the whole picture before starting to make drastic changes.